Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
5.4.1.1 The Leg Bone Is Connected to the
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The maturity issue is not all about current application functional footprints.
“Standard functionality” is another maturity related issue that most PLM solution
vendors face. Even though product development has been around for many years,
most of the PLM solutions deployed at company sites are home grown tools focused
at automating specific steps or a particularly difficult activity in the process. Even
the commercially available PLM applications were originally built to automate a
particular company's way of developing products.
PLM software companies have taken those initial solutions and cleaned them up
to more generically address the PLM functional area. This is one of the reasons
why the different PLM software solutions have such a wide spectrum of capability
and also why the quality of the software can differ so much even within modules
provided by the same vendor. The company and the project that provided the original
code foundation for the PLM feature function significantly impacts the software
performance, stability, and usability - even today.
The PLM user interface and its general usability is a prime example of the
“functional Frankenstein” that implementation teams are forced to deal with given
current levels of software maturity. When project teams work to combine multiple
packages from different vendors to address scope needs, the implementation chal-
lenges can include everything from the simple lack of screen flow standards, search
paradigms, and inconsistent behaviors to really poor performance, software version
incompatibilities, and data integrity concerns.
Once again, these issues surely are not unique to PLM software. As the flurry of
consolidation slows in the industry and the PLM solution modules have a chance
to gel and mature together, most of these challenges will likely disappear. To that
end, many of the leading PLM vendors are working to accelerate this stabilization
period by launching - and in some cases even completing - complete code rewrites
to existing modules and products.
5.4.2 Technical Complexity of PLM
PLM solutions are complex software packages. Just look at the configuration
options and algorithms for resource utilization and capacity planning against a port-
folio of diverse products, or consider the BOM substitutions and variances into the
product definition of a specially configured server. The point here is not to debate
which software solution is more complex than another, but instead to recognize the
potential impact of the technical complexity of the PLM solution on project exe-
cution. Indeed, technical complexity is a major contributor to the implementation
challenges, solution quality, and costs of a PLM implementation.
A couple of years ago, a large computer manufacturer implemented the prod-
uct configuration engine from a PLM application suite. When planning for the
implementation, the project team failed to recognize and communicate to manage-
ment that given the complexities of the company's products and the breadth of user
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